Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Fair, Balanced, and to the Point

About this web log

This blog is intended as an objective and dispassionate source of information on the latest CAM research. Since my background is in pharmacy and allopathic medicine, I view all CAM as advancing through the development pipeline to eventually become integrated into mainstream medical practice. Some will succeed while others fail. But all are treated fairly here.

About the author

John Russo, Jr., PharmD, is president of The MedCom Resource, Inc. Previously, he was senior vice president of medical communications at www.Vicus.com, a complementary and alternative medicine website.

Common sense considerations

The material on this weblog is for informational purposes. It is not medical advice or counsel. Be smart, consult your health professional before using CAM.

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That’s impressive considering that a 2 point decrease in pain scores is generally clinically significant for patients with chronic pain such as fibromyalgia. The conclusion one comes to is that pain therapy is easy when CAM is used. Yet, in the real world controlling pain is anything but.

Furthermore, the authors concluded it was a service that was practical and financially feasible in the real world. And apparently all this was accomplished with no side effects to patients.

Many questions go unanswered. For example, it would be useful to know the contributions of individual CAM treatments. It would be useful to know whether CAM was alone or as adjuncts to alopathic treatments. It would be useful to know the underlying diseases of these patients and the drop out rates. The authors did none of this. They reported the minimum necessary to support a positive conclusion, and the editors apparently never asked for greater detail.

Too bad because in the absence of these details it’s impossible to come to properly assess the reported conclusions.